Fantasmic not Phantasmic: Crossing Thresholds with Rushdi Anwar

This essay examines the work of Rushdi Anwar — born in Halabja, of Kurdish heritage, resettled in Australia under a UN-sanctioned programme — through the twinned registers of art-historical inquiry and autobiographical witness. Opening with the proposition that the historian's craft depends upon citation and indexical proof, the text argues for interiority, for the evocation of the artist's inner world, as an act of defiance against notarised history. German Expressionism supplies the initial anchor: its slanted architectures and gestural marks are read as a recodification of vision that turns the ocular inwards, offering a genealogy for Anwar's own aesthetics of rupture.

The essay situates Anwar's practice within Kurdish statelessness, understood as a fantasmé in the Freudian sense — an identity tethered to an inconsistent imaginary, without official language or recognised territory. Close readings follow of three works: We Have Found in the Ashes What We Lost in the Fire (2018), whose vessels of charred heirlooms, gathered after the Battle of Mosul, rest on plinths of human height; A Few Lines of History (2011), soot-treated photographs shadowed by the chemical attack on the artist's hometown; and A Hope and Peace to End All Hope and Peace (2023), a satirical anatomy of the Sykes–Picot Agreement and its cartographic violence.

Central to the argument is a distinction between the phantasmic (the mythic) and the fantasmic (a space of enchantment), and a question drawn from Mahmoud Darwish: in which language should the exiled subject dream?